MOOD-Mindfulness fOr sOftware Developers - Finanziamento dell’Unione Europea – NextGenerationEU – missione 4, componente 2, investimento 1.1.

Peopleware refers to anything related to the role of human factors in Software Development (SD). High-tech companies (e.g., Google or Meta) are known for valuing Peopleware by investing in having fun things to do or good food to eat at workplaces during working hours. Peopleware has also been attracting increasing attention from the research community. The interest of both the software industry and research community is due to the current economic system that demands short time to market, high quality, and the need to stay on budget. This intertwining of factors and demands is ruled by time pressure, which might expose developers to the risk of experiencing stress, burnout, and reduced motivation, leading, in turn, to reduced job performance and lower quality of SD-related artifacts. The literature on Peopleware has highlighted that, to prevent these negative outcomes, it is important to intervene on extrinsic and intrinsic aspects of the job. In this respect, mindfulness is one of the most promising interventions that might let developers do their best at work. Among the mindfulness-based programs available in the literature, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is a manualized and well-validated group-based intervention program. While there is empirical evidence on the effectiveness of MBSR in improving wellbeing in different working contexts, there is no evidence that it works in the SD context. In other words, empirical evidence needs to be gathered to show that results achieved in other working populations also hold in SD, where tasks require great mental effort and are ruled by time pressure. We propose MOOD (Mindfulness fOr sOftware Developers), a project whose main goal can be summarized as follows: customize MBSR in the context of SD-related tasks and assess (in the short- and long-range) whether it helps developers to improve their wellbeing and performance, as well as the quality of the SD-related artifacts they produce. MOOD will expand the body of knowledge on the (short- and long-term) effects of mindfulness—and the ad-hoc MBSR protocol, in particular—in the SD context. Also, we will delineate lessons learned to help developers achieve their best at work through our ad-hoc MBSR protocol and to drive the research on mindfulness in the SD context in the following years. At a developer level, we expect that our ad-hoc MBSR protocol will improve developers' wellbeing (e.g., by lowering stress). At an organizational level, we foresee an improvement in developers' performance and quality of SD-related artifacts, while at a societal level, we expect to reduce the indirect cost caused by poor wellbeing at work (e.g., developers experiencing burnout). Also, it is expected to have a reduction of employee turnover, which is burdensome to the software industry due to the recruiting, selecting, and training expenses.